[Foundation-l] Partnership with Mandrakesoft

[Jean-Christophe Chazalette]

Are we talking about a formal written contract or about an oral agreement ?
Needless to say I strongly encourage a formal distribution deal, the
transfer of responsibilty having quite a big potential of financial troubles
(suing Wikimedia Foundation is not an opportunity because it is a Foundation
and it has no significant financial background, this is not at all the same
for MandrakeSoft ...). If needed, I'm willing to assess such a written
contract.

villy

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Angela" <beesley at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Partnership with Mandrakesoft


Mandrakesoft are aware of our editing processes. They know what they
are getting, and that the content has not been verified. They have
agreed to take legal responsibility for this. Basically, the only
changes we are making is to remove images tagged as fair use, unknown,
unverified and other unsuitable ones. Since the image tagging efforts
on the English Wikipedia are going fairly slowly, there may be a large
number of untagged images would also need to be removed.

The arguments over whether a Wikipedia DVD is going to be useful to
people aren't really for us to decide. Mandrake obviously think people
are interested in this, and if they turn out not to be because they
can read it online, then we haven't lost anything. The chances are
though that this will significantly increase the exposure of Wikipedia
to a wider audience. Hopefully many of them will access it online, and
even become editors themselves, but I don't think that detracts from
the appeal of having a DVD published.

This DVD production is in no way meant to deter people from the
validation processes that are being proposed. Obviously these will be
hugely beneficial for future distributions. However, it's also going
to take a very long time before the product of such processes is
ready, so distributing a non-validated version in advance of that is
beneficial.

No one is claiming this distribution is perfect, but as a snapshot of
Wikipedia I feel it is valuable. It's great advertising for us, it's
great as an early trial of distributing our content offline, and it's
great for raising awareness of the need to tag images properly.

I strongly encourage others to help with the tagging drive as there
are still many untagged images that can not be distributed at this
stage. I'd also like to thank the following people for taking in part
in the recent drive to tag images. This is based on the recent changes
to the lists of untagged images, and the list of participants at
[[Wikipedia:Image copyright tags]], so I apologize in advance for
anyone I've missed out: Yann, Jdforrester, Eugene van der Pijll, Tom-,
Diberri, Rich Farmbrough, Gamaliel, Stan Shebs, Lupin, Sj, Blankfaze,
Chmod007, GeneralPatton, Frecklefoot, Sunborn, Morven, Ævar Arnfjörð
Bjarmason, Trilobite, Poccil, Morwen, Secretlondon, Anthony DiPierro,
Imran, Maximus Rex, Flockmeal, Guanaco, and Frazzydee. Thanks also to
Looxix for creating the lists of untagged images and everyone who has
been doing the same task on the French Wikipedia.

Please help with the tagging at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yann/Untagged_Images and see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_and_Mandrakesoft for further
information.

Angela.
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